The most important thing you can do to protect the security of your account is to not share your account password with anyone. In many cases we are unable to verify the rightful owner of the account, and in most cases we cannot recover anything stolen from the account.

Three Rings Design and the Puzzle Pirates staff will never ask for your password. We do not need to know your password and will never ask for it for validation purposes.

Do not give out your account information or password if you are contacted over an instant message service (such as AIM, MSN).

Do not accept files sent to you over instant messaging services. These files can contain malicious software intended to steal your account information.

You should only ever use your Puzzle Pirates account to log into the Puzzle Pirates client, Account page, the support page, the Puzzle Pirates forums or the YPPedia. You should never enter your Puzzle Pirates account name and password into any other program, website or forum.

We are aware of a link going around that redirects players to a web page that is an exact copy of the forum log-in page. In filling out this form, rather than logging into the forums, one is in fact unwittingly handing over their account name and password to a scammer. We have taken steps to identify and lock out those accounts that have been already been compromised to prevent any further damage to them. If you are the owner of one of these accounts please do e-mail our support department using the e-mail support form (http://www.puzzlepirates.com/support ) immediately to confirm ownership of your account.

Protecting your account from this attack is as simple as verifying what website you are visiting before entering sensitive information such as your username and password into a form. Before logging in, verify the address bar reads "http://forums.puzzlepirates.com/" as that means you are on the forum section of puzzlepirates.com. It is also a good idea to double check where a link is actually linking you before clicking on it. Most browsers will have a status bar (generally at the bottom of the window) which when your mouse is hovering over a link will show where you are being directed. If the link looks suspicious and you're not sure what website you are being linked to, please don't click it!

In addition to this, if when browsing the forums a window pops up prompting you for "authorization" or otherwise asking for your account information please be aware that this is not normal forum behaviour and is another version of the scam to get your account information. As such, please do not fill the form in. Instead, please submit a petition to the on-duty Ocean Master (by clicking Ye - Help - Petition in-game) and let them know what thread it occurred in so we can review the matter and take care of the offending scammer. Petitioning an Ocean Master is always the best first step for this or any other forum problem.